Editor's note: Most Fridays, The News-Press' senior writer and storyteller Amy Bennett Williams shares one of her essays with listeners of NPR affiliate WGCU. Here's the text of this week's and you can listen online as well.

Well, I got in a little later than I'd planned this morning, but how could I walk away from Blind Willie Johnson?

It seemed disrespectful to tap a screen, yank out the earbuds and head inside before he'd finished "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground."

So I sat, sealed in my Toyota with the AC running, until that last chord rang, then faded, marveling at this culture that allows a comfy, middle-aged commuter to listen to the moans and ragged breaths of someone who died of malaria more than 70 years ago.

Whatever it means to be human, our interest in remembering ourselves has to be a defining characteristic, as does our interest in poring over artifacts long after their makers are gone.

Or maybe it's just me.

Anthropology, after all, is what I'd planned to do with my life, back in the days when I thought life could be planned. Though things didn't work out that way, my proclivities are what they are. When I wake up with the 3 a.m. fantods, reading pioneer journals, Victorian love letters or Seminole War-era maps online is more calming than a mug of Sleepytime by far.

Lucky for me some long-gone humans had the presence of mind to save those things for me. Sometimes I fret that we may regret not leaving more durable records — as electronic as our lives are now. Yet if we could just hang on to the e-chronicles we produce, I'm sure they'd be every bit as interesting to a future ethnographer as old newspaper clippings are to me.

As I was working on a recent story, I decided to check my memory about whether the trees lining a road in east Bonita Springs were cypress or not. I used Google Street View, a cool tool that allows you to move a little yellow Gumby-type character named Pegman through stitched-together photos, cruising around as if you were in a car.

I'm glad I did, too. There was no cypress to be seen — just the typical junky melaleuca mix, pocked with ATV spin-outs and crumpled trash piles. And speaking of trash, what was that parked on the side of the road? I zoomed in. An old pickup with a full trailer hitched to it, with a guy in back looking like he was trying to decide where to dump it.

Google's Pegman heads down a Bonita Springs back road and sticks his nose where it probably doesn't belong.(Photo: Special to The News-Press)

Not really a monument to early 21st-century humans at their finest, but we are what we are, right?